Info

Several beers in primary and secondary at this point, so I thought I would provide an update on some of the stuff that is going on as well as some plans for the near future.

Imperial Stout: We racked the beer to secondary and are still planning on adding raspberries to the secondary for about 3-5 weeks. Oregon Fruit Puree makes fruits, usually used in pies/desserts, that many homebrewers use for their beers. We were having trouble finding the fruit at the grocery stores that we normally go to, but today I was finally able to score 3 cans from a nearby store. We might bottle a couple of bombers before we add the raspberries so we can do a taste comparison with- and without raspberries. Fermentation was good and we finished at 10% alcohol. The hydrometer sample tasted very good and looked very dark. Should be good.


Brown Ale: The last batch of brown ale finished at 1015 which is a little higher than the previous batch of 1011. The higher final gravity is attributable to the higher mash temp and more long-chain sugars which are not fermentable by brewers yeast. Hopefully, the higher gravity will result in a matlier tasting beer. We dry hopped it today and will bottle it in 2 weeks.

Experimental Batch: I havent said much about this beer, as I dont really want Elise to know what is going on before she tries it (swish and spit of course) but we did do a few things we havent done before. First, we used a malt called Carafa. Darker malts are made by kilning them and essentially controlling the "burn" on the husk creating a darker husk (darker the longer it is kilned) and different flavors. Color of malts is measured in degrees Lovibond (L), and for a comparison brown sugar is 50L, chocolate malt is 350L, and Carafa III is 525L. We used a decent amount in the beer, so it is a very dark color. Longer kilning can also lead to a harsher/bitter flavor which is common in a malt called black patent. However, Carafa malts are de-husked, so that the bitter flavor and some of the roasty flavor is removed resulting in mostly color additions with a slight amount of roast. This was also a 2.5 gallon batch (that I boiled on the stove) just in case it doesnt taste very good, I wouldnt be as mad about wasting the money, and time to drink, on a full 5 gallons. We are dryhopping with a full ounce of hops, which by 5 gallon standards would be fairly high. This is more dry hopping than we have done with any beer at this point and we are also going to let the hops sit for ~10 days before we cold crash. At best, the beer will turn into a sort of "black IPA"-type deal with a twist. The twist I wont reveal now, but when I am able to finally taste the bottled version I will share the info.

IPA: while my parents were in town, we were able to brew together so they could see the process. We made an IPA and based the recipe on our previous attempt. The first time we tried to write our IPA recipe it was way to complicated. We were trying to get a beer that had some body along with some malt complexity. To make the beer "complex" we tried using several differnt specialty malts that added up to being a decent portion of the grist. The result? Partly due to underattenuation, but mostly from the amount of malts, was a beer that was way too sweet. The sweetness masked all of the hop bitterness resulting in a very bad example of an IPA. The color was nice looking and if you were to tell people it was a hoppy Red Ale, then it might be good.
For this batch, we only had a total of 5% crystal malts (compared to 8.5% previously) and a little bit of CaraPils for head retention. The beer attenuated very well and ended up at 7.1% alcohol. I think this is just a little too high, but that is an easy fix for next time. The picture above is the gravity sample we took a few minutes ago. It looks darker in the picture than it acutally is, which is a good thing as we though previous attempts were too dark. The sample tasted pretty good with a decent citrus twang from the amarillo, centennial, and cascade hops.
We also "built" the water for this beer instead of using our tap water. The chloride:sulfate ratio helps either accenuate malts (high chloride) or hops (high sulfate) in a beer. Carbonate ions are good pH buffers that are helpful in dark beers as the darker malts are more acidic and can lower the mash pH too low. Carbonates help buffer against this and are therefore commonly seen in local water where dark beers are traditionally made (think Dublin and Guinness). Aurora water is very high in carbonates and has an average chloride:sulfate ratio. To deal with this, we only use 30% of our home water and the other 70% was distilled water which has no ions in it. We then used some brewing salts and stuff from the house (kosher salt and baking soda) to build our water to the specifications we wanted. Hopefully, this combined with the better recipe results in a much better IPA that we can then start to make small tweaks to for our House IPA.


Future
We wont be brewing for a few weeks until my Spring Break. During which we plan to brew our Gatorbait Pale Ale (~5.8% and 60 IBUs) as we have not made that in a long time and are completely out. The following week I have a test on Monday and Thursday, so I am off Tuesday so we are going to try our hand at another strong Belgian ale, the Tripel. Tripels are insidious little beers as they look and taste tame from their golden appearance and drinkability, but they pack a punch at about 9% alcohol. Now that we have a temperature controlled fridge we will be able to keep the beer nice and warm which is needed to get the nice Belgiany yeast characteristics that makes Belgian beers famous. This was the problem with the latest batch of Belgain Pale ale in which I think we feremented it too cold, ~68, as that was the hottest I could get the beer in the house.
Future brews may include a series of beers using a yeast called California Lager, which is used to make the beer Anchor Steam. It is a lager yeast that can be feremented warmer (58-60) instead of normal lager temps (46) but is still very clean. We would make an Anchor-type beer, a schwarzbier, and a Batlic Porter.
We are also tinkering with the idea of doing single hop beers. We would make 2.5 gallons of pale ale hopped to the same IBU rate, but use only 1 kind of hop in each beer. This will help us identify what each type of hop brings in terms of flavor and aroma and should be fun to see how different hops really are.

Brown Again

I had a test on Monday, and another on Thursday, so I was off today and decided to brew our Brown ale again. After dropping the chocolate in half for the last batch I thought it was a pretty good beer. It was a little drier than I wanted and therefore lacked the malty-ness that I want in the brown. So today, same recipe, and we just mashed higher (154 instead of 151)so hopefully it isnt as dry as the previous batch. We normally dry hop, but this time I am going to dry hop for 7 days (we used to only do 3-4 days)to hopefully get more out of the dry hops and increase the aroma. This batch should only be slightly different from the previous batch, but hopefully the changes will make it better.

When we eventually do get a house we are going to start kegging our beer. We will probably end up with 6 taps at a time since we like such variety of beer. Because of this we are going to have several "house" beers in which there is usually always one on tap. I was thinking that there will be be about 4 house beers so that we have 2 taps that can be rotated out as seasonals, special occasion beers, etc. The 4 house beers that I am thinking of will probably be a brown ale, IPA, porter, and then either an American pale ale or the Belgian pale. We are going to brew these beers a lot between now and then so that we can perfect the recipes to our tastes. This is the 3rd batch of brown ale, and over Spring break I am going to brew the 2nd attempt at our IPA as well as the American Pale ale.


On another note, I racked the barley wine to secondary and while I think it will still ferment a few points more, we are currently at 11.5% alcohol. Less than last years 12.6%, but still high. The gravity sample also tasted very good, so hopefully next January this batch will be as good as the first one. It will sit in secondary to bulk age until the very end of April when we will bottle and wax dip it.

Russian Imperial Stout

In honor of the coming baby we brewed a Russian Imperial Stout (RIS) today. We had some issues initially with mash temp being too low and then the mash not draining properly. But after those were fixed the day went pretty smoothly and the OG was 1093; hopefully we'll end up at a little over 9% alcohol. We are planning on aging the beer on top of raspberries in attempts to make a beer that is similar to chocolate raspberry soufle. This beer has a lot of dark malts (Crystal 120L, roasted barley, black patent, and chocolate) that will hopefully lend a big-bodied, roasty/chocolately flavor that will be balanced by the sweet acidity of the raspberries. As you can see in the picture from the mash, the foam on top already has a nice creamy-brown color, and hopefully that will stay into the beer as well. We dont plan on drinking this beer until about next February/March when Elise can start drinking again. The age will help mellow the beer and blend all the flavors together as well as tone down the alcohol. Hopefully it turns out as good as it sounds.





This other picture is of our fermentation fridge. In the winter our garage is about 54 degress which is too cold for ale fermentation, and the fridge will usually be within about 1-2 degrees of the garage temp. Our temperature controller has heating and cooling settings on it, unlike some others which only have a "cold" setting. With the barley wine we tried using a heating pad to keep the fridge warm enough, but the heating pad has an auto-shutoff, so that didnt work as well for fermentation. The next idea was to get a lightbulb to heat up the chamber and so far, that has been working out pretty well. Whenever the fridge gets below 63, the light will turn on and heat the chamber back up again, and then turn off. Eventually when fermenatation ramps up, the beer will raise the temp by 3-8 degrees, so we might have to switch back to the cold setting and have the fridge on to make sure it doesnt get too hot in there.

Fermentation

For the Small Beer I thought I would take some pictures to show what fermentation looks like. The top layer of "foam" is called krausen and is basically all yeast. Top cropping is a process that many homebrewers and some commercial brewers (especiall Belgian Trappist ones) do by skimming the top layer to collect very healthy yeast that will be used in the next batch of beer. Its a good way to get viable, healthy yeast and it also saves money by reusing the $7.75 yeast multiple times instead of just once.

18 Hours:



26 Hours:



40 Hours:


72 Hours:



You can see the progression of the fermentation by the rise in the krausen, after about 72 hours most of the time fermentation will slow down and the kruasen will slowly fall back into the beer. Now that we have a dedicated brewing fridge we will then put the beer in the fridge at about 38 F for 4-5 days to make sure everything in suspension will drop to the bottom. Then, when we move the beer off the yeast cake we can make sure to leave everything behind resulting in a clearer beer.

Long Busy Day

Today was a long, super busy day that started at 6 am and ended at ~230pm. First thing this morning was the 75 minute mash for the Anniversary Barleywine. We normally mash for about 45 minutes for normal strength beers (6%-ish, gravity about 1.060) but when you are brewing super high gravity beers (today's BW was 1.119) you want the wort to be more attenuative. By mashing lower at 149-150 (instead of the normal 153-154) different enzymes are more active at that temperature and break up long-chain proteins found in beer. These proteins are what give the sense of "body" in the beer, so by changing the mash temp we can essentially control the body of the final product. By mashing higher (>156) we would have more long-chain proteins in the wort that are not metabolized by the yeast because the short-chain proteins are easier for them to eat. There will be more of these long-chain proteins left after fermentation, a higher final gravity, and more body in the beer. Mashing lower (less than 153) creates more short-chain proteins in the mash which the yeast will metablize easier leaving a higher alcohol beer that is drier because of the lower final gravity.




With the left over grains from the BW we added more water to the mash to make a second beer. This techinique is called "partigyle" in which multiple beers are made from one mash. Historically, this was how all beer was made, and the first runnings (or first "gyle") was the strongest beer that went to the Royals, the second gyle went to the commoners, and the last gyle went to the slaves/workers. Our second beer came in around 1058, which will make about a 5.5% beer. I was hoping to have a little smaller beer of around 4.5%, but since I added some more grains (for color and body) to the mash before the second round of water was added, the gravity came out a little higher than anticapted. Hopefully it will turn out OK, and even if it doesnt, it only cost an extra $3 for a little less than 3 gallons of beer.





Third item on the agenda today was bottling the Porter we that brewed 2 weeks ago. I forgot to buy more bottle caps, so I only had 31 caps available and filled about 42 bottles before I realized I wouldnt have enough caps. We were saving a bunch of bombers (22 oz) for the BW, but I had to use about 12 of them to be able have enough caps to bottle all of our beer. So we will be drinking a lot of porter in the next few months so we can get the bombers back for the BW bottling sometime in May. This batch of porter came in at about 5.5% and the yeast cake was split 3 ways. About 150 mL of it went to the BW and ~60 mL went to the Small Beer. The rest (~500 mL) was saved in a glass jar and will be used in some future batches of beer.



I finally took some pictures of the grain mill in action,





Step 1. Measure grains

Step 2. Hook up a drill and mill the grains

Milled grain:

2010 In Review

Just finished bottling our Belgian Pale Ale, the last batch of beer brewed in 2010. Here are some of the final stats from 2010:

Batches: 19
Volume: 98.5 gallons
Bottles: 859
Overall Cost/bottle: $0.90

Aging Barleywine

Making sure we save some bottles to age. Since we are going to make this beer every year, in 2015 we will be able to do a vertical tasting in which we taste batches that are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old; should be cool.